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Google Notifying Webmasters Who Run Afoul of the Guidelines

Posted on September 16, 2005 by Stoney G deGeyter

The news that Google is testing a program to notify webmasters when their web site’s run afoul of the search engine guidelines is spreading pretty rapidly. A confirmation has also been posted by Googler Matt Cutts on Threadwatch.

This is excellent news, a long time in coming, and one that is likely to change the SEO industry considerably. Right now they are testing with certain obvious things such as JavaScript redirects and hidden text, but hopefully they’ll expand that to include just about anything that may cause a site to get banned.

I can imagine it already. How many SEOs out there are going to start getting angry calls from their clients asking about the email received from Google? It’s one thing to get banned and for an SEO to be able to explain it away as something else, it’s quite another to know EXACTLY what the banning is for and knowing who is responsible.

Aside from that, this will also be a great way for innocent site owners who may have unwittingly run afoul of the guidelines to get things corrected in a timely manner and get re-included.

I’m very happy about this development, as I feel it is one of the first real helpful improvements made by the search engines in a long time.

Stoney deGeyter is the author of The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period!. He is the founder and CEO of Pole Position Marketing, a web presence optimization firm whose pit crew has been velocitizing websites since 1998. In his free time Stoney gets involved in community services and ministries with his “bride enjoy” and his children. Read Stoney’s full bio.

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